Time to bring people with disabilities into development

Throughout the world, people with disabilities are often ignored, sidelined or effectively disenfranchised – “out of sight, out of mind”, as it were.’ However, there is one arena in which one would expect the opposite: development thinking and planning. After all, the mainstays of development — education, health, employment and participation in society on an equal basis with others — are a constant struggle for people with disabilities, who comprise 15% of the world’s population. Yet our thinking about the relationship between disability and human development remains stuck in a charity niche, an afterthought to ‘the big issues’. What we should rightly regard as a scandal is also a simmering crisis.